The New Republic: Slain Sniper Hero Chris Kyle Was No Different Than A Terrorist

Indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy. It leads the modern liberal to invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Very simply if nothing is to be recognized as better or worse than anything else then success is de facto unjust.

There is no explanation for success if nothing is better than anything else and the greater the success the greater the injustice. Conversely and for the same reason, failure is de facto proof of victimization and the greater the failure, the greater the proof of the victim is, or the greater the victimization. — Evan Sayet

Imagine the following scenario: a young Muslim from the Islamic world joins his country’s armed forces to fight an aggressive war against an overwhelmingly Christian nation. He gains accolades for his work as a sniper, executing his job with ruthless efficiency and little remorse. He admits to viewing the war he is fighting through the prism of religion. He gets a tattoo on his arm declaring that he embraces the concept of holy war. When parliamentarians in his own country question the conduct or course of the war, he states, “How would they know? They’ve never even been in a combat situation.” After shooting someone whose widow claims he was holding a Bible rather than a gun, he answers, “I don’t shoot people with Bibles. I’d like to, but I don’t.”

How would this person be described when his story was recounted in the western press? That’s easy: He’d be described as an Islamic fundamentalist–aggressive, dangerous, and intent on evil.

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Now let’s also imagine that this man was widely embraced back home: That he became the author of a bestselling book, and served as a symbol of strength used by politicians to pursue their own ends. How would the culture that lauded this man be described? Well, that too is easy. It would be said that this man’s Muslim country was full of fanatics, and, moreover, that fanaticism more broadly was celebrated–or at least not condemned–by large segments of the population.

…None of this is to say that his death is less than a crime, or that he would not have continued helping veterans had he lived longer. (Routh, it seems, could really have been aided had he met Kyle before his final descent began). But Kyle is a product of his society to the same degree that Islamic fundamentalists are, even if those societies are not equivalent. The value of Kyle’s story is that it allows us to look in the mirror.

Even though Isaac Chotiner spends the entire piece painting Chris Kyle as no different from a radical jihadi who’d like to blow himself up on a school bus, he did toss in this line to cover all his bases, “I mention all this not to draw moral equivalence between Chris Kyle and someone from, say, the Taliban, because I don’t think they are morally identical, or even roughly equivalent.”

He tossed that line in because he knows how appalling the average human not steeped in “America is the root of all evil propaganda” will find what he has written. So, like a coward, he wants to paint Chris Kyle as a piece of garbage for his audience of America hating left-wingers, but then use that as a shield when he gets called on it.

How shameful.

PS: If we really took a “look in the mirror” as a society, what we’d find is that we’d be a lot better off with a lot more men like Chris Kyle and a lot less morally bankrupt liberals like Isaac Chotiner.